Firstly, namespace declarations don't appear as attributes in the XPath data
model, so you can't find them on the attribute axis (which is where you are
looking when you write @x).

Secondly, there's no point doing this in a predicate, because your match
pattern match="meta:htmldescription" won't match unless the namespace is
correct.

If you want you could add a template rule:

<xsl:template match="*[local-name() = 'htmldescription']" priority="0.9">
  <xsl:message>The htmldescription element is in the wrong
namespace</xsl:message>
</xsl:template>

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jean-Roch Meurisse [mailto:jrm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 28 September 2004 14:37
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  matching namespace declaration 
> 
> Hi everybody,
> 
> We have a bunch of documents with the following structure
> 
> <meta:htmldescription xmlns:meta="http://www.cetic.be/retroweb">
>          <meta:element>....</meta:element>
>          ...
>          <meta:element>...</meta:element>
> </meta:htmldescription>
> 
> We want to transform these documents using xslt and would 
> like to check at 
> the same time that they have the correct namespace declaration.
> We tried with the following template but it doesn't work
> 
> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
> version="1.0" xmlns:meta="http://www.cetic.be/retroweb">
>                    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
>          <xsl:template match="meta:htmldescription[@xmlns:meta = 
> 'http://www.cetic.be/retroweb'">
>                  <root>
>                          <xsl:apply-templates/>
>                  </root>
>          </xsl:template>
> ...
> </xsl:stylesheet>
> 
> can somebody help us
> 
> Thanks in advance